How Facebook whizzes made “Look Back” videopalooza happen

We’ve written a bit about the infrastructure challenges Facebook faced in providing more than 700 million Look Back videos to its users. But if you want more of the nitty gritty, take a look at the video below of Goranka Bjedov’s talk at the recent Facebook data@scale event. Hosted near Facebook’s newish Cambridge facility, this was the first such event to occur outside California.

Bjedov is a [company]Facebook[/company] capacity and performance engineer, but she could find a career in stand-up comedy. For the company’s tenth anniversary on February 4, 2014, the company wanted to offer users (potentially 1.3 billion in all!) a video of their life highlights on the site. Oh, and it had 3 weeks to get it done.

A sneak peek from Bjedov’s talk: “I have the best job at Facebook. Mostly I just yell at people and tell them they can’t have the servers and to go away.”